[Acute precordial pain: 100 cases in 3 years]. / Dolor precordial agudo: 100 casos en 3 años.

OBJECTIVE: To find the effectiveness of diagnoses of acute precordial pain seen as an emergency at our centre. DESIGN: Observational, descriptive and retrospective study. SETTING: Urban primary care centre. PATIENTS: The 100 most recent patients who attended as an emergency with their first episode of acute precordial pain were included. STUDY PERIOD: December 1994 to March 1998. Home visits, patients without medical records and those seen on repeated attendance for precordialgia were excluded. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: The emergency diagnosis and the diagnosis recorded afterwards in the clinical history of 100 people with acute precordialgia, aged 54.9 (16.7 years; 56% [n = 56] women), were gathered. Ischaemic cardiopathy (41%, n = 41) and mechanical precordialgia (36%, n = 36) were the most common initial diagnoses. We found 66.6% sensitivity and 81.4% specificity in the detection of ischaemic cardiopathy. The proportion of diagnostic errors was not linked to the pathological history of anxiety, ischaemic cardiopathy or oesophageal disease. CONCLUSIONS: 41% of precordialgias are diagnosed as presumably ischaemic and are potentially serious, although only 50% of them are confirmed as such. Our sensitivity in their diagnosis is comparable to that of other studies.